Because of the recent announcement of Left 4 Dead 2, a lot of fans are wondering whether it’s worth the trouble creating any custom content because the it may not work with the new game. I found this quote from one of the writers for most of Valve’s games which addresses the issue.

Chet_Faliszek wrote:One thing we do know for sure is we want to make sure that everyone making a Left 4 Dead 1 map now or campaign now it’s still going to work in Left 4 Dead 2. You will be able to start Left 4 Dead 2 up, you will have the new creatures automatically, you’ll have the new weapons you will have all of that in the world, if you want to do some of the new director stuff or some of the new ways we control item placement you can go re-do it and add that, but you can also just leave it the exact same way and it will work.

When I was first reading about this on the Left 4 Dead Blog I started thinking of playing de_dust with hordes of zombies which was apparently done in the demo but never released. But then I remembered that I only have the game for XBOX 360. In the few news reports that I’ve read I haven’t seen any mention at all of XBOX changes. If you read that blog Yasser Malaika talks about how easy it will be to install the add-on by double clicking the VPK file. More than likely Microsoft will make me pay for every custom map that is freely available for the PC version.

Read More

http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/media/nr/2009/nr20090618-eng.aspx?rss=true

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4069/125/

Google Main Page 20 KB
Search for Cody Taylor 38 KB
Search for asdf asdf 10 KB

The search for Cody Taylor was so large because of images displayed at the top of the pages.

Bing Main Page 109 KB
Search for Cody Taylor 22 KB

Over 5 times the data of Google. The search for Cody Taylor on Bing didn’t show any pictures but was still twice the size of a normal Google seearch. If we take into account the New Ajax onMouseOver event on Bing for each search result it becomes 27 KB still without any images. Remember those articles that went off about how much energy every google query uses? Looks like Bing more than triples that amount.

Of course both these sites are much more effecient when we take into account that after the first visit most of the large data is already cached in our browser. For this test I was clearing all my cache between each transaction.

Bing does have quite a few redeeming features and for a first impression it looks like it may be a serious contender but it still lacks the simplicity and speed of google.